THE INCLUDED MIDDLE: LOGOS IN ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY

403 Pages·2006·1.98 MB·English

The Pennsylvania State University
The Graduate School
College of the Liberal Arts

THE INCLUDED MIDDLE:
LOGOS IN ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY

A Thesis in
Philosophy
by
Omer Orhan Aygun

Copyright 2007 Omer Orhan Aygun

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2007
The thesis of Omer Orhan Aygun was reviewed and approved* by the following:

John Russon
Professor of Philosophy
Thesis Co-Adviser
Co-Chair of Committee
Special Member

Daniel W. Conway
Professor of Philosophy
Thesis Co-Adviser
Co-Chair of Committee

Veronique Fotí
Professor of Philosophy

Christopher E. Long
Associate Professor of Philosophy

Mark Munn
Professor of History

Shannon Sullivan
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Head of the Department of Philosophy

* Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.
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ABSTRACT

Our dissertation is a research of the various meanings of logos in Aristotle’s
philosophy and the conceptual relation between them. Our method is dialectic,
bringing a survey of Aristotle’s philosophy together the argumentation of our thesis.
We started from the very beginning of the Aristotelian corpus, we devoted our first
two chapters to Aristotle’s logic, chapters III and IV to his philosophy of nature, and
our last chapters V and VI to his ethical political philosophy. Thus, we have worked
on four fundamental meanings of logos respectively: “standard”, “proportion”,
“reason” and “discourse”.
Our thesis is the following. In its four fundamental meanings in Aristotle’s
philosophy, logos each time refers back to a focal meaning: a relation between terms
that preserves them together in their difference instead of collapsing one term to the
other or holding them in indifference. Thus “standard”, “proportion”, “reason” and
“discourse” as well as their synonyms and derivatives all refer back to a relation
between formerly contrary or mutually exclusive terms. Thus the term logos in
Aristotle provides the inclusive counterpart to what could appear as a simply
exclusive principle of non-contradiction or of the excluded middle.
Most significantly, the sense of logos which defines human beings refers to
their ability to understand and express both experiences made first hand and
experiences they have not had and may or will never have first hand. It is this sense of
logos that sheds light on the specifically human character of education, science,
historiography, politics, psychology, sophistry and philosophy.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................vii

INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................1
A. THE QUESTION.........................................................................................3
B. ARISTOTLE’S METHOD..........................................................................7
1. Dialectic...........................................................................................7
2. Aristotle on method and diaclectic................................................12
3. Dialectic as a way toward nature...................................................14
4. The modality of dialectic...............................................................18
5. Dialectic as maieutics....................................................................21
C. METHOD OF THE DISSERTATION......................................................23
1. Two impasses: Inductive method...................................................23
2. Two impasses: Deductive method.................................................28
3. Method of the dissertation.............................................................32
4. Outline of the dissertation..............................................................36
5. Further perspectives.......................................................................41

Chapter 1. BEING: LOGOS IN THE CATEGORIES..................................................48
A. HOMONYMY...........................................................................................49
1. Aspect............................................................................................50
2. A kind of somnolence....................................................................54
3. An exclusive version of the principle of non-contradiction...........55
4. “Underlying thing”.........................................................................56
5. An example....................................................................................57
B. SYNONYMY............................................................................................61
1. Logos of being................................................................................62
2. A kind of waking...........................................................................65
3. An inclusive version of the principle of non-contradiction...........67
4. Another sense of “underlying thing” ............................................71
5. Return to the example....................................................................73
C. RECAPITULATION AND REORIENTATION......................................78

Chapter 2. POTENCY: LOGOS IN ON INTERPRETATION.....................................86
A. THE INHERENCE OF LOGOS................................................................87
1. The problem...................................................................................88
2. Revision of the project...................................................................91
3. Return to Aristotle’s example........................................................94
4. Return to logos...............................................................................98
5. Return of logos.............................................................................100
B. POTENCY...............................................................................................103
1. A trivial concept of potency.........................................................104
2. A temporal concept of potency....................................................105
3. Motion..........................................................................................109
4. Action...........................................................................................112
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5. Potency and logos........................................................................114
C. RECAPITULATION AND REORIENTATION....................................118

Chapter 3. NATURAL MOTION: LOGOS IN THE PHYSICS................................121
A. THE NATURAL......................................................................................122
1. The definition of nature...............................................................124
2. Undoing conceptions of early modern physics............................126
3. Everyday “physics” .....................................................................133
4. Nature as being-at-work...............................................................136
5. Logos and nature..........................................................................139
B. THE ORGANIC.......................................................................................142
1. The soul as eidos..........................................................................144
2. The soul as entelekheia................................................................147
3. The organic..................................................................................151
4. Nutrition.......................................................................................153
5. Reproduction................................................................................158
C. RECAPITULATION AND REORIENTATION....................................162

Chapter 4. ANIMAL MOTION: LOGOS IN ON THE SOUL...................................169
A. SENSATION...........................................................................................171
1. Affection......................................................................................172
2. The fire example..........................................................................176
3. Alteration.....................................................................................177
4. The wax example.........................................................................180
5. The lyre example..........................................................................183
B. LOCOMOTION.......................................................................................189
1. “Transperception” .......................................................................189
2. Locomotion..................................................................................192
3. The “practical syllogism” ...........................................................195
4. A middle term..............................................................................198
5. Beyond locomotion......................................................................201
C. RECAPITULATION AND REORIENTATION....................................205

Chapter 5. HUMAN ACTION: LOGOS IN THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS..........211
A. ETHOS.....................................................................................................213
1. An unpractical syllogism.............................................................215
2. A tripartite soul............................................................................217
3. A kind of learning........................................................................221
4. A kind of imitation.......................................................................224
5. The limitation of ethos.................................................................226
B. HEXIS......................................................................................................228
1. A new kind of listening................................................................228
2. Hexis............................................................................................231
3. Freedom.......................................................................................233
4. Medicine, architecture and music................................................235
5. Hexis meta logou..........................................................................237
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C. ÊTHOS.....................................................................................................240
1. Hexis kata ton logon....................................................................240
2. Bodily hexis.................................................................................244
3. Moral virtue.................................................................................247
4. Deliberation..................................................................................251
5. The dilemma of character painting..............................................254
D. RECAPITULATION AND REORIENTATION.....................................260

Chapter 6. HUMAN DISCOURSE: LOGOS IN THE POLITICS............................265
A. SOUND AND VOICE.............................................................................267
1. Production of sound.....................................................................270
2. Reception of sound......................................................................272
3. Physiology of voice......................................................................274
4. Semantics of voice.......................................................................275
5. Reception of voice.......................................................................279
B. THE FIRST ARTICULATION OF LOGOS...........................................281
1. Letters..........................................................................................282
2. Articulation..................................................................................289
3. Nouns...........................................................................................292
4. Meaning.......................................................................................300
5. Understanding..............................................................................304
C. THE SECOND ARTICULATION OF LOGOS......................................309
1. Wish.............................................................................................309
2. Autopsy........................................................................................315
3. Three kinds of hearing.................................................................319
4. Human logos................................................................................325
5. Conclusion...................................................................................328

CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................340
A. THESIS....................................................................................................341
1. Back to “logos of being” .............................................................341
2. Thesis and summary of dissertation.............................................342
3. Implications of human logos........................................................346
B. THE HUMAN CONDITION..................................................................351
1. The Cycloptic...............................................................................351
2. Law..............................................................................................354
3. Language......................................................................................356
4. Love.............................................................................................360
5. The Oedipal..................................................................................364
C. NOUS.......................................................................................................370

BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................375
APPENDIX: LEXICOLOGY OF LOGOS................................................................389
INDEX OF GREEK TERMS………………………………………………………393

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express gratitude to Rémi Brague who generously offered me
his support, advice and erudition, as well as debt to my friends Katherine Loewy, Eric
Sanday, Hakan Yücefer, David Bronstein, Gregory Recco, William Harwood, Erdem
Gökyaran and Michael Schleeter who have contributed to my work by their
discussions and criticisms. I would also like to thank the Philosophy Department at
the Pennsylvania State University for providing me an educational and therefore
philosophical setting during four years, and the Fulbright Foundation which granted
me optimum work conditions for thesis research in Paris in 2005-2006. None of them
is to be held responsible for any shortcoming in the following, but the rest of it could
not be written without them.

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Canım annemle babam Güzin ve Birol Aygün’e.1

1 Turkish for “To my dear parents, Güzin and Birol Aygün.”
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INTRODUCTION

“They do not understand how that which is disrupted has the same
logos as itself: a back-turning harmony as in the bow and the lyre.”
Heraclitus.1

In this dissertation, we investigate the various meanings of logos in Aristotle’s
philosophy. We argue that they all refer back to one focal meaning: a relation
between terms that preserves them together in their difference instead of collapsing
one term to the other or holding them in indifference. Thus the term logos in Aristotle
provides the inclusive counterpart to what could appear as a simply exclusive
principle of non-contradiction or of the excluded middle. In the specific context of
human beings, logos refers to their ability to understand and express experiences they
have not had and may or will never have first hand.
Our dissertation takes the hybrid form of an argumentative research, each of
its six chapters focusing on the function of logos in each of the following six
Aristotelian texts: the Categories, On Interpretation, Physics, On the Soul, the
Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics. Seen retrospectively, our work presents
arguments for our thesis, while prospectively it assumes the form of a research
offering interpretations of particular central passages from these works. The former
aspect of our thesis thus is well-suited to the reader who would approach the text
“horizontally” from beginning to end, as indeed we wish each reader to do, while the
latter welcomes the reader limiting herself with a “vertical” reading of isolated
chapters. Each chapter opens with a compact road-map for the ongoing overall
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argument, and then with a brief fresh introduction on the specific topic of the chapter
for the reader who has just opened the text. To partially avail the reader from having
to open the original texts while reading our thesis, the translations from Ancient
Greek, all made by us, attempt to be as literal as possible at the risk of not always
being eloquent in English, and as consistent as possible in terms of the
correspondence between the central Ancient Greek words and their English
translations. For the latter purpose we added a short index of Ancient Greek terms at
the end of our dissertation.
In this introduction, we first present our topic in the context of Aristotle’s
work and of his posterity, and then attempt to justify our overall procedure in relation
to Aristotle’s own method.

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